MIT’s Nexi: The Cartoonish, Emotional Robot – Gizmo Watch

MIT’s Nexi: The Cartoonish, Emotional Robot – Gizmo Watch: “Here, we have a next-generation tiny humanoid robot called Nexi. It’s an ‘emotional robot’ designed by roboticist Cynthia Breazeal’s group at the MIT Media Lab. They call it an MDS (Mobile/Dexterous/Social) robot that can move its body, hands, and face in a way that suggests human emotions. Its arms, wrists, and hands are fully adaptable to clutch and raise stuffs up to 10 pounds. It possesses perfectly changeable features including eyes, eyebrows, eyelids, and mouth movement. Markedly attractive and chillingly touchy in a cartoonish way, and yet doesn’t cause any problem recognizing the feelings. It moves on a pair of animatedly self-balancing wheels.Nexi can create 3D maps of its environment owing to a color camera in its eye an IR system in forehead. Nexi aims at supporting study and instruction targets in human-robot interface, teaming, and social learning. Until it is used commercially in homes, we can certainly look forward to utilize it for research into human-robot relations.”